With so many AJAX options these days, one might ask, what do I need this project for?

This project started out as a need I had for a very large and purly dynamic(one .aspx) ASP.NET CMS system.  Most systems like this are heavily based on UserControls and have been around a while.

Well, guess what, times have changed and people want a more responsive UI that doesn’t require full page refreshes.  What can we do about that?  We could re-write our UserControls, but wait, we may very well have 1,000s of hours of development and testing against them; we can’t just throw them away.  If you have the need for a project like this then you probably have a pretty large install base and a complete re-write isn’t possible.

I set out to try and find a way to utilize all the core back-end business logic usually embedded in UserControls in a Web 2.0 way and without using UpdatePanels.  This solution I came up with is somewhat a hybrid of UpdatePanels but with the postabacks.

Ucajax does not support postbacks!

I only wanted to utilize the rendering business logic of UserControls.  If I was going to re-write anything I wanted it t be the postback logic with new JSON based web services that I could utilize across the system.

So, there you have it, you can still get some mileage out of those UserControls and bring some Web 2.0 life to them.